The National Weather Service has assessed significant amounts of damage today to confirm this morning’s weather event was actually a 5.2 mile long, 125 yard wide tornado with 85 mile per hour winds.
Tornado classification is based off of archived radar data, collected damage surveys as the day goes on, and primarily, wind speeds. The Fujita Scale quantifies recorded wind speeds on a scale of EF0-EF5 with any windspeeds beyond 201+ miles per hour as an EF5.
Based off of the Fujita Scale, this morning’s tornado was just one mile per hour shy of being classified as an EF1.
At 2:05 a.m. the tornado started in the Carrollton, Riverbend neighborhood then moved east toward the Amtrack terminal. From there, it continued moving southeast toward the Central Business District before crossing the Mississippi River to Algiers. At 2:12 a.m. the tornado lifted at the Marine Support Center.
Any additional damage that occured was due to severe thunderstorm straight line winds.
When cleaning up debris, be intentional in bundling and bagging all broken limbs or branches and setting them out as you would for regularly scheduled trash pick up over these next few days.
This is the tenth tornado to touch down in New Orleans since 2000, and the last tornado to hit New Orleans was in July of 2019.
